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Hi Chenzo, We noticed some real big increases across about 15 of our target keyword phrases a day or two after the recent algo updated (granted denied by Google). These updates for us we think are due to this update as we've been expecting the rank changes for a long time but much of our efforts could not budge our SERPs positions. Even though all our indicators were showing that we were not where we were supposed to be in relation to our competitors. I would add that these rank changes have affected our US positions, or UK positions (where we are located) have stayed relatively the same. In reference to Oren's comments for we always expect to see a drop in traffic around the 16th of the December and that I can see is staying true to the nature of our business. The positions I would add are centred around maybe a cluster of pages that have high PA, they are the ones where I've seen jumps in numbers of +9 as an average, with one in particular on a +20 (now first page) where previously it has stayed roughly on page 2 and 3 (Google SERPs) for most of this year. One has gone from 12 to 2 overnight and is still there today. Best, David

Hey There I know this question is a little old but just want to add some things. If we're talking about volume only - and getting accurate numbers from the Keyword Planner there are a few important things to know. First of all - the changes are just calculating the numbers in slightly different ways. They are still accurate, so long as you know what's different. For one, volume for desktop and mobile is now combined together - there is no separate report at the moment for desktop vs mobile so you're seeing these volumes combined Next is they are now averaging volumes across the last 12 months (which before I imagine they may have pulled from the most recent month) Now you can also not only get volume by country but also by city, state, region etc. Lastly - they are showing you all exact match volume by default - which is what you want. Broad and even phrase match are not very ideal for SEO. So when you go into keyword planner, it's actually easier in my opinion to get the right data. You don't need to set a match type. You don't need to add up desktop and mobile and they have average the last 12 months for you. The only thing you need to do really is decide on your location. If you want to know how many people type "french chocolate" in France vs. the whole world or vs. Italy - that's the biggest choice you have to make really. Full documentation from Google on the changes here. Hope that helps

Hi Ruchi, thanks for your question! Did any of these responses answer it? If so, please mark them as "good responses." Thanks! Christy

Hmm interesting, now that you mention it. This issue isn't happening for me in Safari, IE or Firefox but it is happening in Chrome. I have not, I don't do much with .htacccess and when I've tried it hasn't worked hah. Not sure how I would go about doing that.

If its been redirected it will filter down to Google and get updated in the SERP so don't fret too much.  If you are worried you can always rel=canonical it to your preferred address which will back up any preferred index issues.

NEVER go on whats in the SERPs. Get recommendations - so MOz is a good place to start. Why not look for the really technical SEO posts on moz and then approach those companies? I can recommend Distilled You could look at the http://moz.com/community/users users board and pick someone from London that has a ton of points - this indicates they have been helpful to the SEO community over a number of years. I'm at 21 and I am based in London. Marcus Miller is at 12 and he is based in Birmingham There is also a MOZ recommended list http://moz.com/community/recommended Stephen

Hi Vince, If there is such a tool, I haven't seen it. Chris's suggestion to export/import csv files into Excel and combine there would probably be where I'd start, but I'm not sure how easy it'd be to work with the annotations in Excel. There's a Greasemonkey (Firefox) script to export them, but I haven't used this myself so I can't confirm how smoothly it works. Mash-ups of multiple metrics on a single chart like this I rarely find to be helpful, as they become visually confusing quickly - but if this is exactly what your boss is looking for, you're probably going to end up creating something in Excel and replacing the data each time (but saving the visualization settings). You could also hack together a macro to handle the repeating and tedious tasks. Sorry I don't have a better/shorter/easier answer for you here. If you do find or build a solution that is robust and/or elegant, I hope you'll head over to YOUmoz and share it with the community. Best of Luck, Mike

Hi Anthony, So glad the resource helped!

I won't be doing it.  The Search Engines have changed since the early 2000s. Do you have a .us or .info to protect your brand?  To match my domain authority and brand awareness from Google, they would have to tons and tons of work.  "Protecting your brand" implies to me that someone will be pretending to be you and sell stuff that you offer.  They'd have to outrank me for my keywords and brand awareness.  I don't see that happening.  EMDs could still be worth it but people naturally search for things vs typing in the exact domain name with correct extension.  (I know Google had an EMD update but that effect mostly thin content EMD)  If you are truly a "brand" with recognition, people know what outlets you have.  If someone is pretending to be BobGW.blog, I find it hard to believe they would be overtaking your efforts.  I just don't see it working out like it did early on in the web.  Brands matter now and microsites (though they still work) are going by the wayside.

I've edited this question to keep it TAGFEE, especially empathetic to both the potential client and to their current SEO company. This can be a good discussion question when talking in general terms, but given how Q&A is visible to everyone and indexed, we need to pull out this type of identifying information.

when you say the local keywords you mean horse riding costa rica or horse trek monteverde? The company name is Horse Trek Monteverde There are other companies with more general names such as horseback riding costa rica and costa rica horseback riding,

Also, you can try changing the user-agent of your web browser to "googlebot" so you can see if the site is doing anything sneeky when Google comes crawling.

For the most part, links from askives and mrwhatis are ones that I classify as "not seo made".  They're autogenerated pages that link to almost every site on the web.  If you were affected by Penguin it's definitely because of links that you made.  Look for self made links from low quality sources like article sites, low quality directories, bookmarks, etc.

Hi Stacey, If you the Google+ business page you created was not created in the local category, you cannot merge it with a Google+ Local page. See Google staffer Jade W explanation of this here: productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/3R1-XOGvVzE Also recommend you read: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/2U2NmtIi0Xg Hope this helps!

Neenor- Google does quite a bit of work to keep pages that show "explicit" content from appearing, unless the end user is searching for adult content.  Lingerie images walk a fine line between safe content and one that won't show up during a normal search.  Based on what you've written, sounds like their site is more on the risque side of things... The best way to see if your clients' site is affected is to turn Safe Search ON, and then see if their site will appear in search results. Safe Search, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SafeSearch), is a feature that acts as an automated filter of pornography and potentially offensive content. In a statement given to The Verge, a Google spokesperson said: "We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for -- but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you're looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting -- you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in web search."

It's a cool thought, and it very well be an improvement over today's situation. The major reservation that jumped out at me was that it would hurt fresh content. I'm guessing 100 was a number you just threw out there, but whatever the number, once a site hits that number of quality links, they wouldn't need to produce anything else. Well, at least in terms of link building, they wouldn't need to produce anything else. Also, different size sites would need different numbers. For example, 100 really high quality DA of 90 and above links would take my site a long time to get, but, Moz, for example, probably already has that. If you decide to make the number really high, 10,000 high quality DA of 90 then it might take Moz awhile to get that, but since neither myself, nor any of my competitors will ever reach number, it's not much of a deterrent for us to get fivver, comment links. Ruben

As the type of person who would pay somebody for such services I would have to say that it depends on your actual skills and abilities. How many hours work do you see this taking or should I say how much of your time would it take to acheive this. Considering you are not only doing the SEO work but you are creating the website as well. Perhaps look at breaking the cost down on a per client basis. For example one clients website might be small but another client they might require a much more involved website. If this is your primary source of income I would suggest asking yourself what do you need to survive? If you can do all this in one week then what do you need to survive for one week? Once you have built a reputation and have clients under your belt then perhaps you could charge more? Sorry I know I did not actually answer your question but I hope I have given you some "Food for thought"

Firstly, have you received a manually penalty, I say this because its far too easy to disavow loads of links but are they really doing you any harm? If you feel it really is a problem you can disavow the whole domain: domain:article-niche.com When you disavow it will dissassociate that domain (or links) from your site. More info - [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en) Hope that helps, Good luck!

Hey Harry, For the top 5-10% of these pages (specifically the ones with the highest referral volume to your site or high domain authority), try and write some custom content to supplement your boilerplate stuff. For the rest of them I wouldn't worry about the boilerplate content. Duplicate content on the pages would mean that it's unlikely that all of them would rank together, but I can't think of any reason that it would decrease the link value sent to you.

adwords- I would love a compare date range view in adwords like they have in analytics